Even though news of potential interest rate cuts has led to optimism that the IPO window might reopen and things might improve in Startup Land, it appears the global venture capital market has yet to level-out: Early data from PitchBook indicates global VC investment in startups continued to slide in the fourth quarter of 2023.
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While things are down sharply in the United States compared to the heady days of 2021, investment trends seem to have largely reached a new normal — U.S. startups raised $37.5 billion in Q4 2023, which wasn’t much less than the $37.6 billion they raised in Q2 2023 and $39.8 billion in Q4 2022.
In contrast, here’s what’s happening globally:We are still going down, folks!
The cybersecurity sector was once largely untouched by the vast headcount reductions taking place across the wider industry, but 2023 shows no sector is immune.
But it’s clear that cybersecurity firms are no longer exempt from layoffs, despite a strong workforce and an ever-increasing number of cyberattacks and breaches.
According to data from layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, more than 110 cybersecurity companies have made cuts since the beginning of 2023.
The layoffs came almost exactly a year after Malwarebytes eliminated 14% of its global workforce.
While many cybersecurity firms blamed economic headwinds for reductions in headcount, Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski told TechCrunch that the layoffs were an exercise in rationalizing expenditures.
Financial Intelligence Unit, an Indian government agency which scrutinizes financial transactions, said Thursday nine global crypto exchanges — including Binance, Kraken, Kucoin and Mexc — are operating “illegally” in the country without complying with the local anti-money laundering act and asked the IT Ministry to block their websites.
Global crypto exchanges are required to comply with India’s anti-money laundering rules and cannot evade the guidelines just because they don’t have physical presence in the country, the government agency said.
Cryptocurrencies were brought into the ambit of anti-money laundering / counter financing of terrorism framework in India in March this year.
India began taxing virtual currencies last year, levying a 30% tax on the gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction.
“Most Indian crypto exchanges are FIU registered entities and adhere with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, suffered an outage globally earlier Thursday that lasted for more than an hour.
X Pro, formerly known as TweetDeck, also faced the outage.
This was not Twitter’s first outage – the abrupt workforce cuts earlier exposed the site to more vulnerabilities and reliability issues.
The last major outage on the platform, which was still called Twitter at that time, occurred in early July.
Users encountered “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets” errors.
In the fight against Methane, a key GHG, Valley investors have hit upon an unusual target: Cow burpsWhat do iconic Valley investors Zachary Bogue and Chris Sacca have in common?
And one of the bigger issues at the most recent COP meeting was a pledge to reduce methane emissions, which are growing rapidly.
And a major UN report said “urgent steps” are necessary to reduce methane if global warming is to be kept within a manageable limit.
Mootral says its current Ruminant supplement can reduce methane emissions from dairy cows by up to 38 percent on commercial farms.
CH4 Global — which is backed by the aforementiioned Zachary Bogue of DCVC — employs seaweed in cow feed to reduce their methane emissions.
Playground Global, the storied early-stage venture capital firm, brought in $410 million in capital commitments for its Fund III to invest in early-stage deep tech and science companies.
With Fund III, similar to its $500 million Fund II raised in 2017, capital deployments in Fund III will focus on seed and Series A companies with initial investments ranging from $1 million to $20 million.
For Fund III, we broadened our LP base to include endowments, foundations, and single and multifamily offices.
When we founded Playground, our team was purpose-built to help develop both consumer technologies and deep tech companies.
We’ve been investing in deep tech companies since we founded Playground, with PsiQuantum being one of our very first investments.
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